Fox's Bride (3 page)

“I am feeling faint. Chandur, return the fennec. Accompany me back to my apartments.”

“No, no.” The voice of a priest was sickeningly cheerful as he intruded on the conversation. “The Golden Scoundrel should stay by your side during Gods Week. But if you wish to leave, we have your escort ready.”

“My escort?”

“The Golden Scoundrel never travels with fewer than ten men. Sometimes it is his will to test us by running. A fennec is harder to catch than salt on the wind.”

Ten men
, Hiresha thought. Escaping Oasis City might be harder than she had imagined. She could not very well have Chandur knock too many priests around without the empire taking offense, the empire that owned the Academy, her research, and her home.

Spellsword Fosapam Chandur was sorry that his mistress did not wish to marry the fennec god. True, the betrothal had taken her by surprise, but he had always suspected Hiresha's fate to be exceptionally bright. No common man would have done for the enchantress. He had been told as much by his mother
.

She and Hiresha had been childhood friends, or perhaps enemies. Chandur had never been clear on that part. He thought he remembered hearing “that jewel-shitting spinster” thrown about a few times when he was a boy. His parents had sent him away to Oasis City to study as a scribe, and when that did not work out, he had trained as a guard. They had written letter after letter telling how well the family gem cutting business was doing, had urged him to stay in the expensive city. When calamity had forced him to return to Morimound, he had learned his father had earned nothing but debts. They had lost the family's manor and good name.

Hiresha had given his sister a home, had taken them both back to the Mindvault Academy and sponsored their training. The elder enchantress deserved all the fortune the gods placed in front of her, and Chandur was proud to carry one such god sleeping on his left arm.

To his right, Hiresha slept, too, sitting in a sedan chair decorated with opals and a silk canopy. He could tell she had fallen asleep because the jewels of her dress flashed purple. Branching curves of gems were stitched within silk, and the light of their glowing forced him to blink.

Four of the priests' men had taken up the honor of carrying the sedan chair. Now they lowered Hiresha's transport to the ground, setting down their poles. Above, a camel was painted on a wall. The building's plaster shone too white to look at in the sun.

A guard inhaled an aroma of cooking onions and lentils. “The enchantress bride already brings us good fortune. She chose an inn with a kingly kitchen.”

“Hiresha.” Chandur bent down to face her. “Enchantress Hiresha, we're here.”

The jewels on her dress dimmed. She drew air into her nose in a gentle hiss, and her eyelashes lolled open then closed again. She extended a gloved hand to Chandur. His fingers grazed a jewel on her palm, and he activated the enchantment within the gem. Using his spellsword training, he felt like he fitted a key and spun it around three revolutions until magic Lightened the enchantress. For one second she weighed so little that she floated out of her seat, her slippers gliding over the street tiles. She tilted sideways, her balance no better than someone who had woken in predawn darkness.

Chandur steadied her, his hand behind her shoulder warmed by the enchantress’ skin. Her dress left her shapely back bare, and her spine was visible down to her waist. Fosapam Chandur felt guilty for stealing the glance.

The cut of the dress was sleek, fitting, and bold. He had never seen another woman wear a gown with the same design. Then again, he supposed the same could be said of many things done by the enchantress. A pang raced through him, knowing that Hiresha would soon leave this world for the gods' realm.
Don't be selfish,
he thought,
she goes to a better life.

She rocked against him as she staggered into the building. Shade and chill inside the inn soothed Fosapam Chandur. He heard the jingle of the proprietor's many amulets.

“Elder Enchantress Hiresha, my humble home—” The man's face flinched at the sight of the fennec, though he recovered into a grin. “The Golden Scoundrel honors this worthless abode. This is a holy day, indeed it is.”

“A banquet.” The guards burst in. “Your finest for the fennec and his bride.”

“His bride, indeed, yes, she is beauty wrapped in fortune.” The proprietor rummaged through amulets of scarabs and camels. He found one of a fennec and pressed it to his forehead as he bowed.

Men stacked their bows against the arched door and rushed inside, chanting. “Banquet! Banquet for the fennec!”

The god's long ears perked up. He sprang from Chandur's arms, tail snapping back and forth as he zipped around the men, yipping and squeaking.

“Your house has been blessed already.” A laughing priest pointed to a grey dropping the fennec had left on an ornate rug.

“Oh, yes, indeed yes, it is so.” The proprietor closed his eyes and bowed to the floor again. “Gods are eternal!”

Hiresha murmured that she wished to go to her room, but the priests insisted she stay. Fosapam Chandur unlatched his sword from his back so he could sit beside her on a rug. With a strain, he set down the blade of stone. Veins of black and white crossed within the redness of the sword's jasper.

A maid entered carrying a bowl of berries and melon. She was Janny, and at the Academy, other spellswords had warned Chandur to heed her because of her longstanding friendship with the elder enchantress, though he had seen little outward affection between the two. Janny served her mistress simple food that Hiresha did not eat. The house servants carried baskets brimming with lavish fare that Chandur and the other guards devoured.

Crunchy crickets baked in honey and sesame, steamed crocodile and spices, cucumbers and quail, cobra in camel-hump soup, and even some seafood that Chandur felt bad about eating because he knew fishermen had risked their lives far from the city to catch it in monster-infested waters. The priests inhaled the cooking aromas with sighs though they partook only of milk.

The fennec rippled through the air in leaps and bounds of fur. He tipped over glasses of plum wine, to the delight of the men.

“The Golden Scoundrel!”

“And his new bride.” They clinked red-glazed glasses and drank.

Janny propped pillows behind her mistress, so she would not slump too far as she dozed. Hiresha's jewels glimmered.
 
Her eyes shifted in her sleep, a bulge turning this way and that under each closed eyelid. The movement both disturbed Chandur and fascinated him. He knew enchantresses could only work magic in their sleep, a trade secret the spellsword mentors would flog him for telling.

Her closed eyes shifted to look in a new direction. Chandur wondered what an enchantress would see in her dream.

Hiresha carved a gem with her mind. She never felt more awake than in her lucid dreams.

The greyish lump of an uncut sapphire levitated above her palm. Five hundred and forty-eight beams of color bisected the stone, along the facets she would cut. After tweaking a last few angles, she touched the rough rock with an enchanted golden chisel.

Crystalline flakes exploded in a glittering dust that drifted toward the dark walls of her dream laboratory then faded to nothing. The naked jewel floated above her palm, a sapphire of rare clearness carved into a snowflake too delicate to survive in the real world. She had cut out the flaws in the raw stone, leaving a perfection of crystal and mathematical design. The attention she had lavished upon it caused the sapphire to glow with dream power.

With a sigh, the enchantress blew the jewel across the laboratory. Its facets flashed white as it tumbled through the air above a table of black rock, past other floating jewels colored pink, green, and blue. The snowflake sapphire collided with a full-length mirror.

It did not shatter. The glass flowed around it, pulling the jewel into a scene not of Hiresha reflected at the middle of the circular room but instead of Spellsword Chandur as she had last seen him sitting beside her at the inn. She was sorry he would not witness the sapphire snowflake, made as it was from dreams. The jewel danced past his image and landed on his jasper sword. The dream gem soaked into the hilt, powering the enchantment that allowed him to swing the massive weapon.

Other mirrors slid along the dome ceiling of the laboratory. They reflected Hiresha's recent memories. Time flowed backward in the mirrors, and people walked in reverse. Glimpses of guards rubbed their hands together as servants took away baskets bursting with food. Camel milk slid out of a priest's mouth and upward into a cup.

She gazed at the mirror with Chandur's still image. Armor that she had enchanted for toughness and reduced chafing clung its bronze scales to the muscles of his chest. She always worried about him overheating in his coat, though he seemed at ease in the desert climate. A more pressing concern was his lack of helmet. To escape the priests and their guards, she might have to lead him into danger.

“I must enchant Chandur a protective circlet,” she said to herself. She had planned to have had time to search the city bazaars for a likely item. “Tonight.”

“We want the circlet to be so truly him.” The second voice was also Hiresha's, though it came from one of the mirrors.
A reflection of the enchantress wore a dress of identical style but of a different color. Yellow silk glistened, and topazes bedecked the fabric in a hue of citrus.

With a wave of her purple glove, Hiresha summoned a balance for weighing options. The risk-measuring device appeared on the basalt table in front of Hiresha. “I must find the safest route of escape from the city. I'll not allow Fosapam Chandur to come to harm on my account. Nor even Maid Janny.”

The reflection made no effort to copy Hiresha's movements. She hopped up and down on her yellow slippers, pointing at the balance. “Mind the desert scorpions. We hate those.”

Hiresha circled a finger, and a glass scorpion blinked into existence atop one gold tray of the balance. The insect was small, corresponding to the potential danger. A shadow fell over the scorpion from the figure of a man riding a camel. The large probability of nomads waylaying them in the desert weighed down that arm of the balance, alongside the threat of being overtaken by ships that sailed over the sand.

The next arm represented the choice of hiring passage on a land ship. This part of the scale teetered under statuettes of sailors who might decide to try to stop them. The vizier stood taller yet on the same plate, the risk of him discovering their plan. The scale had more than two arms. On another, glass models of priests towered over throngs of guards and pilgrims who would search for Hiresha if she tried to hide in the city.

While she tried to focus, her reflection chattered about details she spotted in the other mirrors.
The woman in the yellow dress distracted Hiresha with observations about how the string on a guard's bow had worn to the point of snapping. Three of the oysters in one basket were dry and shriveled, revealing themselves as rotten. One priest's shoulders shivered from a fever he was trying to hide.

Hiresha, meanwhile, decided she favored a sudden departure. One option was to travel at night when no one else dared to leave their homes or tents. The figurine of the Lord of the Feast crushed this possibility all the way down to the stone table. He appeared in his nighttime aspect, a man with no arms and three heads, riding a most unbecoming basilisk. The image disturbed Hiresha, but she was thankful for the reminder of how his magic distorted him. Fleeing into the night alongside him had tempted her.

“We're afraid what he'd do to Chandur,” the reflection said.

Hiresha nodded. “And encountering him would be a near certainty at night.”